Corwin awakens in a hospital with no idea who he is or why he's there. He has some vague memory of an accident, but nothing more than that. What he does know for sure is that someone is keeping him doped up and in a hospital long after he needs to be, and he's determined to find out why. As it turns out, escaping the hospital is the easy part. Surviving his family while trying to discover who he is and why they're in contention with one another is by far the more difficult task. The alliances he makes are shaky at best, but he slowly regains his memory and returns to the place where it all began: Amber.
Impression:Nine Princes in Amber was a nice, fast read. It's a short book, but that doesn't make it simple. The settings are rich with detail, the characters well defined, the plot less straight forward than it would appear as the princes each try to outsmart one another. Corwin turns out to be no less ambitious, though one of the more likable characters. And there is so much that happens in so few pages that a reread is definitely going to be necessary to catch all the nuances of the story. There were a few lulls that I did have to kind of plow through, but the book is otherwise a very good read. Not one of my favorites, but definitely recommended.
Magdalen was born on Darkover to Terran parents, which makes her the perfect agent for the Terran Empire until her ex-husband and partner is captured by a bandit because of his similar appearance to a Darkover Comyn. She chooses to disguise herself as a Renunciate, one of the Free Amazons who have broken from the traditional roles given to women on Darkover, in an effort to mount a rescue mission. She meets with a band of real Renunciates, among them Jaelle n'ha Mellora, a woman raised in the dry towns until she was 12 years old, saved from a life in chains by the Free amazons who came to save her own mother from the man who had kidnapped her. After Megdalen is revealed as the fraud she is, she is forced to take the Amazon oath for real and the two join up to save the man who ends up being important to the both of them.
Impression: I have yet to read a Marion Zimmer Bradley novel I don't like, and the Darkover novels are among my favorites (second only to the novel, The Mists of Avalon, which will always be my favorite of hers). I always love stories with strong, female protagonists, and The Shattered Chain is no different. In addition to overcoming the obstacles of nature and the laws of a world ruled by men, Magda must also learn the rules that define the lives of the Renunciates, discovering in the process that perhaps she was meant to be a Free Amazon. Breaking from what she was to becoming what she sees to be her real heart is no easy task, but one that has its own joys. One of the things I like about Bradley's work is her ability to use minimal description and still managing to make it so you can see the story and be drawn into it. Her writing is spare, perhaps not as spare as most short stories require, but there is little extra to it, a gift and a talent that I think a lot of us writers could learn from. In its own way it's no less beautiful than McKillip's writing.
